


The Petras Act

by JakeWasHere



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Conspiracy, Gen, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-14
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-09-08 15:02:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8849563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JakeWasHere/pseuds/JakeWasHere
Summary: An interviewer gets a few insights into the mind of the man who made Overwatch outlaws. Or does she?





	

From its position near the southwestern tip of the island, One World Trade Center commanded an unsurpassable view of Manhattan, the bruised but beating heart of New York. The man standing -- or rather sitting -- at the gigantic pane of windows had his eyes fixed on a spot far to the northeast of the tower, where construction crews could be distantly seen preparing to put the finishing touches on a building twenty years in the making. By guessing at the age of the surrounding buildings, one could almost make out the blast radius of the explosion that had destroyed the last structure to stand on the site.

"Where was I?" the mechanical voice went on. "Ah, yes... Well, as a matter of fact I _don't_ think I shall move our embassy offices back up there when it's done. We've been here so long, after all -- almost since the end of the war. I think it would be ungracious to our American friends for us to suddenly cast aside two decades of their hospitality... No, no." He would have shaken his head, had he been able to. "Greece remembers her friends, and especially their kind gestures. It may be troublesome driving crosstown to reach the General Assembly sessions, but then why else would my country lease a limousine if not for such moments?"

"Well, sir," the interviewer said, her camera hovering in the air just over her shoulder, "there is also the matter of security. The new UN building is being built with practically every kind of physical and electronic safety measure known to man or omnic..."

"There is nothing they will have there that I don't already have access to here," the voice interrupted. With an eerie silence, the figure at the window wheeled sideways. There was a pause, then the wall of windows darkened, shutting out most of the mid-morning glare and bringing the man back into focus. He rolled forward across the expanse of his office and halted next to a floor lamp that switched on, illuminating his face. "With the sun-shield switched on, this room cannot be seen into. We have a system in place that obviates all infrared scanning. There are devices attached to the windows that turn any conversation into indecipherable gibberish, should anyone attempt to listen in via laser microphone. Every telephone call or email that leaves this room is quintuple-encrypted on the way out to make certain only its intended recipient can unscramble it. And those," the man concluded, "are just the countermeasures I can actually _tell_ you about; I assure you there are others." The LED lights on the electrodes attached to his temples ceased to glow, and one corner of his mouth quirked up in a wry little half-smile; it was the only facial expression he was capable of, unless you counted blinking. The LEDs lit up again as a further thought occurred to him, and the voice synthesizer at his shoulder spoke up once more: "And as for myself, my system has no vulnerabilities. It transmits signals, of course, but it doesn't have the capacity to _receive_ any -- you couldn't hack it any more than you could hack a remote control."

Wheelchair-bound, his body shriveled and weakened into near-immobility by the cruelties of ALS, Giannoulis Vissarion Petras nevertheless still cut an imposing figure. One could not look at him without remembering that this man had survived five changes in the government to remain Greece's ambassador to the United Nations for most of his professional life, or that as his body had begun to fail he himself had grown more vehement in his rooting out of ethics violations among the Assembly, especially after his nomination to the Overwatch Committee. He it had been who, from his wheelchair, had laid the evidence of Blackwatch's wrongdoings before the Committee and the Security Council and demanded that action be taken; it was he who had initially drafted, then lent his name to, the U.N. resolution that disavowed Overwatch's authority and withdrew all international funding and material support. The catastrophic explosion at Overwatch's Geneva headquarters mere days later had made the disabled Greek look even wiser in retrospect. He was fifty now, but the ravages of the disease made him look ten years older; it had not, however, stolen the piercing glint from his blue-gray eyes.

"I can imagine there's a lot of sensitive material going through here," the reporter said. "Especially now, given the upcoming re-ratifications of European treaties. Are you at all free to comment on that?"

"You're referring to that mess in the European Parliament," Petras replied. "I can tell you that one of our senior MEPs is an old friend of mine, and I trust our representatives to speak honestly for our nation... but at the same time, I don't see what we in the UN can possibly do to help them. And perhaps we shouldn't. I'm a bit of a cynic when it comes to transnational entities -- the UN, the EU, or whoever -- sticking their noses in where they don't belong." He gave his half-smile again, and his eyes glittered. "As you well know."

The reporter returned a smile of her own. "Which leads us, if I may use the segue, to another sensitive subject..."

"Ah. I knew this was coming."

"Yes, the rumors of the Recall message sent nine days ago. People monitoring the old frequencies have picked up a great deal of encrypted traffic; I have to say, Mr. Ambassador, it appears as though some kind of plan may be underway. Naturally, people will be curious as to what 'The Man Who Killed Overwatch' has to say--"

"Let's be clear about one thing," Petras broke in; his eyes conveyed a look of mild annoyance. "I did not 'kill' Overwatch. As far as I'm concerned, it committed suicide. And to be perfectly fair, it had been circling the drain for a long time before the Committee ever got word of what those lunatics were up to."

"Lunatics? That's rather harsh language, sir, isn't it?"

"No harsher than they deserve," returned Petras. "Especially if you've read the same reports I have."

"So we can safely say your position is unchanged," said the reporter dryly.

"Unchanged, yes. Perhaps even reinforced. Rest assured that if they do go back into clandestine operations, I will be the first to demand legal and perhaps military action by the nations of the Assembly. The Petras Act is still in effect." The ambassador's eyes shifted from the reporter to the camera floating behind her. "Anyone, in any UN member nation, attempting to act in the name of Overwatch is a _criminal_. Anyone who aids and abets them in doing so is a criminal. The wording of the act is _not_ ambiguous."

"That's as may be, Mr. Ambassador, but some would argue -- in fact, some _have_ argued -- that we could use a group like Overwatch right now. The world situation, especially with respect to human-Omnic relations, is unspeakably delicate at the moment. Wouldn't it be useful to have available the expertise of some of the personnel who solved the original Omnic Crisis?"

"The situation is, as you say, unspeakably delicate," Petras said. "Which is why the _last_ thing we need is to bring Overwatch back. If there really is a crisis impending, we must take the rational and pragmatic approach; we cannot permit ourselves to be hampered and distracted by some motley gang of rogue idealists who insist on running around the world calling themselves 'heroes,' pretending to be the goddamned Avengers." The reporter looked as though she was about to interrupt, but the ambassador's synth-voice overrode her: "Their time is past. The governments of the world do not want them, and the people of the world do not need them. They are not going to put an end to dangers and conflicts; they will only succeed in exacerbating them."

"I guess that's as unambiguous a statement as I could ask for," the reporter said meekly, adjusting her eyeglasses.

"I do apologize for being so forceful about it," Petras replied. "It happens to touch on some very sensitive and personal areas for me; I've discussed them before."

The reporter nodded. "Indeed you have. Your feelings on idealism are well-known... But what are your grounds for supposing idealism to be so dangerous?"

"Because the idealistic viewpoint, by definition, is divorced from reality to some degree. With all apologies to the late Dr. Harold Winston, these people have gotten so caught up in their Utopian vision, their image of what he called 'the world as it _could_ be,' that they've begun to lose sight of the world as it actually is. The fewer such so-called _heroes_ we have, the better -- that's the whole reason we wound up with disasters like Blackwatch in the first place. They got so caught up in their larger 'mission' that they couldn't see the truth, or the blood on their hands."

"In other words," the reporter observed, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

"Quite so," Petras said. "Though once you've gone far enough down that road, it ceases to matter what your intentions were."

* * *

The ambassador insisted on seeing the reporter out personally; he rolled beside her down the corridor to the front door of the office suite as her camera drone floated behind them. The door slid aside with a soft hiss of hydraulics.

"I look forward to the finished segment," he said, maneuvering to one side. "When may we expect to see it?"

"It should air about eight this evening," she replied.

"Excellent. I'll be sure to inform the rest of the office."

There were a few more minor pleasantries exchanged, and the reporter left, the drone following obediently in her wake. Behind her, the door slid closed again, the sign on its outer side glowing in blue letters: **Ελληνική Δημοκρατία / REPUBLIC OF GREECE / EMBASSY TO THE UNITED NATIONS**

Giannoulis Petras wheeled about and returned to his office, stopping momentarily to warn his secretary not to take any calls for the next few hours. The door shut behind him as he rolled in -- and then a second inner door slid out of the wall and locked in place. A sign in blue letters briefly blinked on the door's surface: _Soundproofing Field Active_.

The ambassador had been not entirely honest in the interview. There were not five levels of encryption on his outgoing communications, or at least not always... at moments such as this, there were _nineteen_ levels. The world's greatest hacker would still require a week to break all of the codes -- and the codes were changed every three days.

His eyes shifted from the door to the tinted windows; the tint darkened completely to an opaque black. The only light came from the floor lamp to one side. The wheelchair moved noiselessly forward, into the middle of a circle embedded in the office carpet; Petras could not have prevented the interviewer from seeing it, but anyone who did not know its purpose usually erroneously concluded that it was simply part of the floor pattern.

The ambassador's right index finger moved minutely. There was a chime and a whirring sound, and a hologram appeared in the air before him -- a tall rectangular window, about the shape of a smartphone screen. Words scrolled across its blank surface: _**Establishing telepresence uplink... Validating encryption... Uplink confirmed.**_

The hologram suddenly opened up. The rectangle still hung before him like a translucent frame or window, but he could now see that his was one of twenty such rectangles arranged in a circle around a virtual table. On each rectangle, or monolith, appeared a curious symbol: between two horizontal rows of three small dots sat a stylized image of an eye, with a vertical slit for a pupil. The sigils glowed piercing red against the shiny midnight-blue surfaces of the monoliths.

"Well!" boomed an electronically altered voice from one of the eyes. "I see that Seven has chosen to join our meeting already in progress."

"I had business to attend to," Petras replied. "I _did_ warn you I might be delayed."

"You weren't telling secrets, were you?" another voice said facetiously.

"Oh, no, of course not," the ambassador said. "Just some nosy little rat from the _Post-News_ ; we didn't come within a hundred miles of any sensitive information. I just fobbed her off with a few empty platitudes about pragmatism and got her out the door -- you know my usual routine."

"Oh, yes, we all know it," said a distorted female voice tiredly. "God knows how many times you've tested those lines out on _us_."

"Nevertheless, ladies and gentlemen," said Ambassador Petras, "I can confidently say that our secrets remain safe." The corner of his mouth rose in a crooked smile again. "Now then, where were we?"

**Author's Note:**

> And now, perhaps, you catch the double meaning in the title.


End file.
